Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Humans being what they are, a woman who wants to achieve the
greatest career success would do best to marry an underachiever. If she has
children, that is. Studies show that women who marry high-achieving men are
more likely to choose their children over career success.

It might be the case, Allison Schrager explains, that wives
of low-earning men need to work more to support their families. Or it might be
that especially ambitious women need to marry men who will take second place to
their careers.

Either way, nothing about this is especially surprising,
except the fact that anyone would be surprised. In truth, those who proclaimed that women could never be happy unless they were fully engaged in successful careers seem to have ,misjudged.

Schrager explains it all:

What
modern women may not realize is that a husband with more marginal employment
can increase the wife’s own earnings. That’s one way to read a study tracking
the careers of 629 University of Chicago MBAs(PDF) over 16
years. After controlling for different skills, occupations, and children,
the study’s authors found that the income of women in the sample was strongly
related to their husband’s income. Those who married high-earning men (defined
as having an income of more than $200,000 a year) earned much less themselves and
were less likely to work once they had children. If the women MBAs did work, it
was often part-time or in less high-powered careers. Women who married “lower
earners” (in this rarefied population, a low-earning spouse had income of less
than $100,000) made the same as their male MBA peers.

This
was the case only if the marriage produced children; childless women earned
more when they married a rich man. And it’s not clear exactly what caused this
result among the MBAs with children. It could be that women with lower-earning
spouses needed to work more to support their growing families. Or perhaps they
had big career ambitions and chose a less-ambitious partner to support their
success. A marginally employed spouse is likely to have more flexibility to
move for his partner’s career and provide child care. These, it’s worth noting,
are the same marital trade-offs that have benefited ambitious men for years.

Surely, it is good that women have more opportunities. It is
good that they have the freedom to choose between home and marketplace.

And yet, the traditional division of labor still pertains.
Only now, we have more role reversal marriages. It remains to be seen whether
women find these situations satisfying, whether they are pleased to leave their children at home with their husbands while going out to support
their families.

For all I know, it might be one of those “be careful what you
wish for” situations.

2 comments:

Lastango
said...

There are multiple reasons why breadwinning women become dissatisfied with their stay-at-home or underachieving husbands. I've listed these before so I won't repeat it here, but the key takeaway is that the women have more discomfort with these arrangements than the men do. (That's worth noting, because the cultural narrative is nearly always the opposite: the men women are wise, compassionate, and strong -- never petty, ego-driven or self-serving -- while their weak husbands are disappointments and the root cause of all the problems.)

Here's a piece profiling several women breadwinners and their relationships.

The detail offered is quite interesting. More tries to spin these women as high-minded and courageously enduring marital disappointment, but the truth oozes out... their discomfort is deeply corrosive, and they never wanted to be married to underachieving men.

True to form, More never goes near a key point about why these couples stay together: if these women divorced their men, they would be on the hook for alimony. In their noisy celebrations of high-earning women, feminists NEVER mention this.